EPISODE 24 – Before and After Business Coaching

EPISODE 24 – Before and After Business Coaching

By mick | December 30, 2020

Hi and welcome to another episode of Builders Business Success Podcast!
 
If you’ve never watched or listened to the podcast, it’s purpose is to look at the common and costly problems that pretty much every builder experiences and offer solutions and guidance to be able to get rid of those issues and fundamentally create a business that gives you more choice. 
 
This is my underwriting philosophy, pretty much about any business, but particularly a building business. Is it’s simply a platform that allows you or should allow you, to have more financial freedom than you had if you were working for somebody. 
 
And definitely more time freedom to be able to enjoy it. Now speak to most small business owners, builders included, that’s kinda rare. 
 
Someone who has a business that really delivers financial success, but more importantly, allows them the time freedom to enjoy any financial success that they may have had. 
 
That’s kind of a rare thing. These are the sorts of issues that we address in the Builders Business Success Podcast. 
 
So in this show, I’m talking to a very cool dude from Western Australia, his name’s Andy Kearns. 
 
He’s one of our Builders Business Blackbelt members. And the reason that I thought we’d talked to Andy is, to give you guys that are listening to this, a bit of an insight into the journey that he has made, and the issues that caused him to seek us out and the challenges that he’s had along the way. Because it’s not as simple and easy and wonderful, is just getting some business coaching and everything’s all right. 
 
That just doesn’t happen. 
 
We try to make it as fun and as exciting and effective as we possibly can, but there are issues. And we wanted to talk about those sorts of things. 
 
And instead of getting an expert to talk on a specific thing like we often do in the podcast, I wanted to speak to a real builder, with real struggles, in the hope that you can really relate to Andy’s journey, and hopefully give you some great ideas on what you can be doing different as well. 
 
We also have a Q & A and our classic segment “What’d I Say?”.

*Transcription of the show*

Hear my conversation with Andrew Kearns!

 
One of the first questions I asked was, what was your story? How did you get here? So I love the answers to these sorts of questions to see how people arrived at starting their own business.
 
– I had a maintenance business before this, to see what was business was like until I got Perway Construction.
 
– [Mick] Yeah.
 
– And then, yeah, obviously you want grow, so we wanted to get other licenses and stuff,
 
– Yeah.
 
– to open more doors.
 
– All right.
 
– And yeah.
 
– And there’s a really interesting question about starting your own business, as opposed to being an employee. And it’s really interesting to see or what people offer as a reason as to why they started their business and how it works out. So I asked Andy that question.
 
– I think everyone has an idea of thinking this is gonna be cruisy, we’re gonna have more free time. We’re gonna have more money in the bank, . And yeah, that did not go that way. We actually worked more hours, less pay obviously. Because you’re trying to figure it all out. And then it’s actually a circuit and the system breaks. And then you’re like, okay, I need , that you actually find out, okay, you can make a business out of this. But yeah, not easy at the start, when you have no direction.
 
– Most business people have any night belief that they should be able to build their business all by themselves and particularly miles. And they find it quite difficult to ask for help. And so one of the really interesting questions I find is, before you found us, what were the sort of things you were getting involved in? What were the sorts of things that you were doing in an attempt to build your business?
 
– Obviously, when that happens, you’re trying to get more work. So that means you’re on notice to make more clients, and you’re quoting more and we’d done a lot of quoting. And last year alone, I think I wasted over two or 300 hours, just running around trying to get jobs and get quotes out, because without all those quotes coming in, and leads coming in and , and I always thought the more leads you get, or the more quoting you get, is the more jobs you get. That’s definitely not the case. Had to work a lot harder in the last two years and not seeing the results. It’s one of these things that you can see why builders got bossed in the first few years.
 
– I always like to find out how we were found. So that’s one of the questions that I asked Andy. How did you end up finding us?
 
– Going back in March, I think it was, March or April. She found you and she said, we’re gonna go on a zoom call and a guy to see what’s about, to be a better builder. And I was very skeptical at the start. I was like, oh, I saw, I don’t know what I said, let’s see if we can do it ourselves, and I jumped on a zoom call with you and after 20 minutes to 30 minutes I actually knew and said, okay, this sounds I should switch on there. And then we started talking about getting paid for proposals or paid for quotes. At the start this could never happen. And then I think after the 40 minutes to 50 minutes in the zoom call, I was like, yeah, I have nothing to lose here, let’s give this a shot. This has been a game changer for us, and it is because we are getting better leads, we don’t run out anymore for people, and putting profit in our jobs. It’s actually, it’s a nice thing to be said.
 
– What were the things that you were skeptical about?
 
– First thing, who you are. I had put me into us, have to say that. And then I was like, I’ve done this before. I’ve done this out development, I’ve paid for a person in a different country, few years back, trying to get better on the business side. I always thought I wanted to do an online e-commerce store, tried that about four or five years ago, didn’t work. And I put my hands up, and then go back to what I know, which is the building game. And yeah, probably now we’re in November, which is, I think April, and yeah, its having my life very happy. Because we have a nice process now. We don’t run out for people there. They come to us and we put them through this, the whole process of the question, the tree question, and we’re trying to be honest with people. And when you come across the table, and you have two clients sitting in the room with you, show frustration in the building game, and you’re trying to teach them all how this should be going. Yeah, people are loving it at the stage with us. So we can’t wait for 2021. Should be good.
 
– Yeah, well, 2020 was a bit of a shit.
 
– Yeah, it was bullshit, I have to say it. If 2020 had happened, Mick, I don’t think I would have been in your course.
 
– There’s the old saying, “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.” So I asked Andy, what were you thinking when we had our first conversation? And Andy and Louise decided to sign up for our initial program, which is Blueprint to Blackbelt. It’s a 12-week program. What was Andy’s thoughts?
 
– Oh, and obviously again, I was very skeptical because I was like, okay, what’s this all about? Because after the zoom call, I was like, okay, let’s see what’s going to happen on this. And then you’re like, oh, we were excited because myself and Louise, it was probably my wife who was in a probably, a bit of a lot of time. And he was there calling , if we’re gonna do this, we want to give this 110%. And I’m very lucky to have Louise beside me because it must be very hard for builders out there without the backup and the two of us literally jumped onto it straightaway and we’d done that 12-week blueprint course. And we gave that 110%, and we actually seen results happen very very quickly, because the boats were starting to change the mindsets. Yeah, I was very skeptical at the start, I have to say, that part when you start doing this, and doing it continuously, I think one is 66 days, you get the habit, even after the 66 days, the habit just continuous. And we do try every day to do the video or the motivations. And it might miss a weekend, but you know what, we’re still on the same mind set. we’re still going strong since April.
 
– As I said, it’s not always rainbows and unicorns, when you jump onto any sort of coaching program. You can have some initial wins, but then there are problems. There are always problems. And one of the things that I tell our guys in Blackbelt, the best thing we can hope for, is in the future, to just have a better quality of problem. We’re always gonna have problems. We just want a better quality of problem. So I asked Andy when he first started blueprint with Louise, what were the struggles? What were the things that you were challenged by?
 
– I’m a carpenter by trade. And for me to think outside the box and visualize higher than anything I ever thought, I thought that could never happen. I was like, okay. I can’t think of that. That sounds very stupid. This is how I visualize that. I said, people might think, but it’s not about that. It’s about getting my mind into a bigger state of mind. And it’s like, visualizing everything there, It’s gonna happen. And I won’t be there, we have to be honest to me. It hasn’t been an easy road. Even since that like, things you do get your knocks, like you said, you get your peaks and then you get your knockdowns but then there’s other days then you just everything’s streaming. Then it’s like, well, it’s working on it. Like I said, it’s no construction guy goes out there trying to be a good businessman. We are good with our hands, we’re good with our hands, that’s what we do. I’m definitely good with my hands and stuff like that. But when it comes to mindset and someone’s like, this is a bit weird at the start. But when he started writing our main goals and bigger pictures. It’s like, well, then the things started to happen. When you do realize this, and you’re like, wow!
 
– So, some years ago, I decided to move from this one-on-one coaching model, to a group coaching model. So when we are doing any sort of trainings or anything like that, even coaching calls, individual coaching calls, we opened it up to the rest of the gang, whoever wants to show up for it. So it always ends up being a group conversation. In fact, every day we have a momentum call where a bunch of our Blackbelt members jump on that momentum call. So I asked Andy what he had found was the benefit or the difference of being involved in a group, as far as coaching a group, versus a one-on-one coaching arrangement.
 
– We actually got a good bio from day one and everyone took us , and we’re the, probably the only Irish pair in the group, everyone had to tell us to slow down a bit. We were talking a bit too fast and straight away, I kept believing that it’s actually a good group. And they’re like a little family now. And I’ve talked to majority of them on the phone and some of them would give me some great advice, Dave and Sherry, Wayne and all them guys, big shout out, Andrew, Carl, Joel, they’re like a little family now, and I reach out to them whenever I can. And there’s some other great characters in there and not even just character, good people for me to learn off, because I’m so fresh in this game and to learn from all their mistakes and lessons is good for us. But I have to say, there’s some experienced people in this group that you will never think that they’re in this coaching group. You always think they’re likely in builders like myself but they come back to make, no one teaches us to run the business the way it should be. So I am unfortunate actually because this year, I’m just, as you can tell, everyone is just like, we’re all 2020. Well, it’s funny, like I just can’t wait for Christmas. I just can’t wait for the break with family. That little group that you have be, they’re very selective. I’ve been in that group now for a long time and not many have come in because you don’t let anyone. You have to go through that process as you’re gonna be accepted, if you do the work in the 12 weeks. You can’t just do the 12-week blueprint and think that you’re gonna get into that. And that’s why myself and Louise said, let’s give this a good go to get into that. So we’re very happy to be there, Mick. And I have to say that, yeah, I can’t thank you enough, to be honest.
 
– “If you keep on doing what you’ve been doing, “you’re gonna keep on getting what you’ve been getting.” That’s a quote from, I think, Zig Ziglar. He’s unfortunately no longer with us. So I like to ask people what they’re doing differently. So I asked Andy what he is doing differently now, that’s made a big difference.
 
– I don’t run out anymore, I don’t run to my clients. When I’m out having a chat in a bar or somewhere, I tell our process and people look and think I’m crazy, because they haven’t got the mindset yet. But eventually I believe every builder every trainee would have this process. They’ll do this kind of procedure because, the free quotes, you think you’re getting it for free, which you are not doing. And we like to spend a lot of time behind the scenes, first building all the wishlist, the wants and everything with the clients, so that I can sit down and do that decent proposal. And obviously we tell the client to join the meeting. There’s a pay the Pulitzer for this. No one has doubted us yet. No one has ever come across gone. No one says, no, I’m not paying, because they see the value. And before I used to run out and try frequently and trying to get as much down as we can, and send out 10 quotes a week, hopefully to get one back. I used to be afraid of calling up the client and asking them the work after the quotes had went out. And now I have no problem ringing up after a few days, how are you going, listening, and if there’s a problem with an issue, I’ll come back out. If not, I’ll resolve on the phone. And before I never used to do that, I honestly never used to do that. I know I’m getting stronger with this. And that was probably my weak points. And even sitting down with the clients in front of the office, I actually enjoy that because if we are not connecting straight away in the meeting, I’m not gonna end up working for this, we’re gonna refer them to someone else because, if we’re not connecting and I’m 10 weeks in your house minimum, and we’re not feeling connected, it’s going to be hard. So before I used to do that. Mick, I used to run to the plans. And now I’m like, okay, if you’re not the right fish, we’re gonna pass you on to someone else, in a nice way because we believe working with great clients.
 
– There are always going to be challenges. So I wanted to know from Andy, what are his biggest challenges?
 
– But obviously I’m lucky I have the wife, on my right hand side, because I could have probably still went out and tried, because I was very skeptical. I have to say that because, mindset, it took me a long time to figure that out. So in the last few renovations now, the four or five months, I was very smooth and with love on that journey. At the start, I’m still probably go nervous, I’m still trying that. Okay, I go out there and the quote, I didn’t know and send a detailed proposal but now it’s literally I’ll get on the phone with Louise, after the questionnaire. And I will ask all these questions to see if you can go to the next stage. If not, of course, we have to judge over the phone and ask all these questions, because if we don’t, I’m wasting two hours of my life driving out to this client to waste another hour. So when you add up all them hours two, three hours in every client, without even going through that process, last year, you can see how I wasted 300 hours of my life, trying to win jobs. Mindsets we’re stubborn. Us builders, us construction workers we’re the most stubborn people out there because we’re like, no, we’ll do it for free and we’ll win a job down the line. So if you do 10 quotes, you win one, which I think now is, that’s not the case for us. If I brought you to my office, Mick, all the good quality clients that’s gone through the process for 2021. If we went to four or five of them jobs, that’s hopefully progress of work for the next year. So compared to run around for all these people, we have actually good clients that have gone through the process of getting counseling approvals. And if we get them, I’m looking forward to next year.
 
– I know many of you watching the podcast, would probably be going, should I, shouldn’t I? Can I afford it, can’t I afford it? All of these sorts of things. So I wanted to ask Andy what he would say to you, if you’re on the fence, if you’ve got some sort of desire to find out whether you should get into something like this, look at our blueprint program or whatever. I asked Andy, what would you say to somebody who is sort of thinking whether they should or whether they shouldn’t?
 
– Obviously Mick, there’s a price in everything. And I have to say to the people, at the start, I was like, okay, can we afford this? It’s not about the price. It was like, cause it was drunk cold. I was like, can we do this? And I was like, you know what, we will make it work. If we put a mindset to it and we have, and if you want to push, if someone’s out there listening to me, I’m not from Australia, I’m from Ireland and,
 
– [Mick] We wouldn’t have picked that up, had you not said anything.
 
– I don’t think any of my friends back home would ever get coached, because we all, we think that we’ll figure it out our own way. And I had people in your group that texts me going, Andy, you’re very lucky in this group that you’re so young in the building game and you’re learning from all of us. So without that alone, myself and Louise puts two hours every day into momentum goals. And we do that four times a week and we do try that. So we’re definitely on six to eight hours on ourselves in . And then myself and Louise does a nighttime. We do some other self development stuff, and so many of us go, I haven’t got the time for that . If you haven’t got time for it, that means you don’t wanna grow the business. And that’s fair enough. If you want us to make a small wage and stuff like this, that’s all good. But if you want time, myself and Louise don’t work weekends though. I definitely haven’t worked a Saturday, in the last few months because I value my time with my family now. Family time is first and I work Monday to Friday. And before I used to work the Saturdays. I tend not to do them now, because I was like, okay let’s go hard from Monday to Friday, and let’s enjoy Sunday. 2021 could be a different stories. If someone sees me out, because it could be busy, we’re building the processes now in the business. So it’s gonna be hopefully systemized in a few years, that we can actually go, okay, we can take a holiday here. Someone else can actually run the business for us. So that’s our angle, it’s to go off on this, a few times a year and spend time with the family and hopefully have the best workers working for Perway, that it’s gonna run itself. So that’s, it’s going to take us, it’s not gonna happen overnight. We’re building the processes as we go, as you know, Mick, and we’re trying to teach all our and what we’re learning to know guys is, we’re teaching all our . We brought them for breakfast there a few weeks ago and we’re learning this course. We’re teaching them because why not? Why not? Don’t be selfish, teach everyone else what you learn. And we can see it already. The traders are loving it because they are in the same boat and they’re on their own on the event. And yeah, they learn from us also, which is great.
 
What’d I Say?
 
There’s two things to consider, instead of trying to figure out what your content should be about. It should always be about your problem, solution, result. You just repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. It might take a different form of a Q and A, or a story less than offer or a win, lose, or whatever it might be, the different approach, right? But that’s what it’s all about, but how you come up with the wording that you use in all that sort of stuff. I learned this really great process in the intensive that I was just amazed about how it changed how your brain worked and when you’re stuck and you’re trying to figure out how to say something, and it’s really frustrating, going through this process really opened up the pathways and just to share one thing that was kind of a blinding flash of the obvious, but you know what? Blinding flashes of the obvious I like, they’re right in front of you and you don’t see them until you see them. And then they go, no, well, that makes sense. And that is when we try to create a video, flow or some written content or something like that, we try to create the finished product at the start. Like we go, what can I say? And you try and sort of edit it as you go. And the blinding flash of the obvious is this, is right brain is creativity, and editing is logic and it’s left brain. So we actually need to split this process in half. And we go through this process, which we’ll be doing in the intensive. To get your right brain activated. And it creates creativity and imagination and it allows to get some really good stuff on paper. And then you put it away and then you’ll come back to it either later in the day or another day. And you’ll come back to it with a left brain approach. So you then edit it. But if you’re trying to do these things at once, which I’ve always tried to do, everyone else tries to do, you’re basically trying to tap into right brain then left brain then right brain left brain, and you can’t do it, like nobody can do that. You don’t ever really use both sides of your brain at once. It’s like you’re either in flow of creativity, or your in system mode and logic mode. So we need to do the creativity, go away, leave it in a drawer for a few hours or a day, come back to it with the specific focus of left brain, sorting this out, following these rules. And I was like in a 30-minutes session, I was blown away with what I ended up with. Like I was impressed with myself to be able to get the volume and the quality of it in such a short amount of time. So that’s a bit of what I learned.
 
Q & A
 
Q and A time. Guess what one of the most common questions I get asked, and quite often I’ll get asked it through Facebook or something like that. What does it cost? What does coaching cost? The answer to that is it just depends. It depends on where you are, what you need, on all of that. But I was reading about this from another coach the other day, and I think their answer was really profound. And this other coach said there are three costs involved with coaching. The first one is the cost of doing nothing. The benefit of doing nothing is you certainly save the money that you would have invested into a coaching program. But the cost of doing nothing is a massive amount of time and financial loss potentially. Simply because as I said through the interview with Andy, the builders main function, in a builder’s main job is to run the building business. Trying to find ideas and processes and tools and techniques and tips that actually work for a builder, is a full-time job. And I know this because that is the full-time job that I do. And there is a lot of shit. There is a lot of crap out there that you’ve got to mine to try and get to the goal. I’ve been doing this for almost 35 years. And so I’ve done a lot of mining and I know I’ve had to move a lot of dirt to get to the goal. And if you think that you can do that, whilst running your business as well, I’m afraid you’re gonna be sadly disappointed. So the cost of doing nothing, is the big one. The second cost is doing it easy. And that is jumping on to a course. And it might be a course like our blueprint program and trying to do it in a convenient way. One of the most profound bits of philosophy, I’ve ever been taught about, this came from an Amway seminar of all things. Who’s ever, hands up, who’s ever been to an Amway seminar? If you’re old enough, someone would have got a white board out at some stage and said, “hey, I’ve got a business opportunity for you.” Not so much these days, but I was listening to this lady, who was an Amway legend in some way. And she basically said, success is built on your inconvenience, not your convenience. And I’ve thought about that over the years. And I see it happening all of the time. In fact, when I give people something, some guidance with. He has had to do something and it will take a lot less time. Even when they get that, they try to go, what’s the short way of implementing that? How can I truncate that so I can take it, so it’s a lot quicker. And folks, if there was a quicker way of doing something, I would have given that to you in the first place. And as soon as I find a quicker way of doing something, I’m gonna share it with you. So when you are implementing something, for instance, if you’re involved in the blueprint program, don’t try and do it in an convenient way. You’ve got to make it a priority and make sure that you commit to it. And that’s the third cost. And the third cost is committing. So the second cost of doing it easy, you’ll make some improvements, and you’ll get some financial benefits. You would more than likely quite effortlessly pay for the blueprint course that happens all of the time. But to really get a fantastic return on your investment, you’ve got to commit, you’ve got to make it a priority. And you will find that as soon as you do that, you start to get a lot more time to do the things that you want to do. You start to get a lot more financial rewards. You’re a lot more confident in how you manage your finances. But the cost of coaching is, it just depends on your level of commitment, where you are, where you wanna go. I know that doesn’t give you a price but it is the best answer I can give you.
 
Where To Go From Here?
 
We’re not for everyone, but if you want to improve the quality of the clients that you get, if you want to build better team, if you want to have more confidence in managing and building your financial base, and get rid of the cashflow stress, there are so many things that you can do, that will eliminate those problems. We may or we may not be the right people to support you through that process.
 
But the one thing I will guarantee you, if you jump on a call with us, we will point you in the right direction whether it’s with us or not with us. Because sometimes we’re just not the right fit. But the next step is just to book a call to find out if we are. Love you to do that.
 
If you’re listening to the audio only version, you can just go to our website, buildersbusinessblackbelt.com.au.
 
There’s a big orange button there, you can hit to schedule a call. Or if you’re watching the video version, you can just hit the button underneath the video. Fill out a little form, tell us a little bit about your business, and then schedule a call, a time and a day that suits you. It’s only a real short call.
 
So you don’t need to wait a month to schedule in. It’s like five to seven minutes. You should be able to find that the next couple of days.
 
So we really look forward to talking to you. I hope you’ve enjoyed this conversation with Andy, and this episode of “Builders Business Success Podcast”. I’m Mick Hawes from Builders Business Blackbelt. That’s it for this episode. Bye for now.

What’d I Say?

The reason that A’s don’t show up on your list is because you don’t have goals that get you here, powerfully enough to move the shit that you’re doing every day out of the way to make space for the actions that are connected to your goal right? 
 
The reason that we don’t have goals that impact us emotionally as adults is because we have so many limitations in our thinking, adults won’t allow themselves to have a thought that inspires themselves if that makes sense. 
 
They go, Oh, that’s stupid you know. People think I’m a wanker if I said that, if I thought that, if I wanted that. All that is is your limitations talking. I found a whole bunch of comments the other day that had been made on some of our Facebook ads and all of that sort of stuff. 
 
There was like about 50 or 60 comments that I hadn’t seen. They’d somehow it went missing and I found them. 
 
Some of them were, you know, a week or two old. And some of them were like really abusive. Like you wanker, why don’t you piss off and shut up, what would you know and all of this sort of stuff. 
 
And that’s cool because what I understand is the builders who are saying that what I’m talking about is a load of shit. 
 
All that’s happening is that the limitations in their thinking are so powerful that they think what I’m talking about is impossible. 
 
So I’m taking them into this place that’s outside of their comfort zone. And remember what are we wired to do? Move towards what? And move away from what? We’re designed to move towards pleasure and away from pain. 
 
If I was right about charging for quotes and they didn’t charge for quotes, what would that make them? It would make them wrong. If they were wrong, that would be pain. 
 
So they’ve gotta move away from that pain. So what do they do? 
 
They come out and they attack the messenger. I’ve even been told I was dangerous spreading this information. Which is quite interesting. I take a bit of a hit to the ego initially I read the comment, you know, and wanna get into a fight. I mean, that’s just the natural response it’s like, come on then. 
 
You step back away from it, and you go, all that’s happening, is I have challenged their comfort zone.
 
And if they were to agree with me, they would have to accept that they were wrong. 
 
That’s painful, it’s not gonna happen. What’s happening with us is if we haven’t got big goals, so we’ve got A’s in our list, it just means that we’ve got limits in our thinking. We’ve got to go to town to start to smash those limits.

Q & A

So one of the most common questions I get asked, particularly when a builder is starting to get some content, video content for their Facebook page, for their Instagram, for whatever social media platform that they are creating content for, you can’t get hung up on the equipment. 
 
You’ve just got to kind of look around this room and see what we’ve got for this podcast. 
 
You don’t need anything like what we’ve got here to create really good quality video. 
 
An interesting thing that I’ve learned over the years ’cause I’ve been involved in this for a long, long time. 
 
And in a previous life before I was even doing building business coaching, I actually ran a recording studio for bands and did TV advertisements and all that sort of stuff. 
 
So I was right into the audio and video production. And one interesting thing that we found through that process when you learn from the experts, when you’re creating video, the audio is the most important component of a video believe that or not. 
 
So you could be watching your video on a phone and if the audio isn’t very good, it’s really difficult to listen to. But you can be really engaged in a movie, even on a phone, if you’ve got good audio. 
 
So what equipment do you really need? Well, you’ve probably already got it. A phone is probably all you need really to get started. You’ve already got a really great technique from a guy, a mate of mine from Japan, his name’s Ken Okazaki. 
 
And he is absolutely brilliant at making video. And he coaches a lot of people all around the world, how to make great video. And one tip that he gave me was using your phone, is obviously for most platforms you use the phone this way, which is called a landscape. 
 
A lot of people use it up this way, which is portrait, which there are certain platforms like Instagram for instance, where you do need to put it up that way. 
 
But Facebook and others, you can have it this way. And this is a really cool tip. It’s the grip, the grip of the phone. And you’ve just got a couple of fingers back there and you’re holding it this way. 
 
So your lenses over here, but the reason he holds it this way is because this cup in your hand, the microphone in most phones is down the bottom of the phone. When you’re holding it out like that protects the microphone from any wind and even any background and sound. 
 
And your voice is kind of bouncing from the palm of your hand into the phone. 
 
So that will give you a really good sound, which as I said before, is really important for your videos. In this day and age, the cameras on mobile phones are just amazing. 
 
So there isn’t an issue with the video quality. Think about lighting and that sort of stuff. If you do wanna go to the next step, you can just get a microphone.
 
I’m sure that sounded pretty good opening Velcro on a microphone never sounds that good. But you can get a microphone. 
 
This is a Deity you can, this one senses what it’s actually plugged into. And it’s only like 70 or 80 bucks and it sounds really good. You can also get a microphone called a Rhode smartLav. But what you’ve got to understand is the plug on an external microphone has to be the right plug for a telephone. 
 
So normal microphones don’t work. 
 
You’ve got to get the correct plug that will work on a telephone. And if you wanna step up to a slightly better quality you can get little gadgets like this which you can also plug your microphone into. 
 
And this one is it’s called the DJI Osmo Pocket. And the camera actually moves in three different ways. 
 
So it’s a three axis gimbal, so you can walk along and it takes all of the movement out of, if you’re doing a walk and talk or you can just pop it on a shelf and you can be walking back and forth and the thing follows you. It locks onto your face and follows. 
 
You say, you can, you can step up the quality. They are about five, six something like that, hundred dollars. Very very cool, very very small, you can just chuck it in your pocket. 
 
So you don’t need a lot of equipment. Honestly, you can just, you know with the Ken Okazaki grip, we’ll call it that now. If you learn how to hold the the phone with the Ken Okazaki grip you’ll be golden. As long as you’re in a quiet room, a quiet area, it will work really well. So I hope that’s helpful.

Takeaway & Summary

So what is the takeaway from this episode of Builder’s Business Success podcast? 
 
I think the most important thing that we’ve talked about and Steph talked about was that marketing for a building business or any tradespace business should not be an afterthought, it should not be something that bolts onto the side of your business. 
 
So your business exists, then you’ve gotta try and figure out how to market it. 
 
My philosophy is figure out what are you passionate about? What type of projects are you passionate about? 
 
Then you can figure out what type of people that have those projects you love working with. Not for, with. And then your marketing strategy, is all about how do we attract those people. You figure out what are their fears, frustrations, wants and aspirations. 
 
The content that you create should really be attractive to those sort of people and should not be attractive, in fact, if it’s smart, it repels the people that waste your time and the type of people that you don’t want in your business. 
 
So you don’t have to go through a qualification process if your marketing content does that job for you to a certain degree. 
 
When you understand who the people are you wanna attract, the type of projects that you would prefer to do and your content is wrapped around that, the next part of that is that all of your procedures, your systems, your communications, in the delivery part of your business should be focused on that type of person as well. 
 
That way, your whole business, everything about your business is focused on the type of person that you prefer to work with on the projects that you prefer to work on. 
 
All of a sudden your business becomes very very attractive to people in that space. And that’s what you’ll tend to attract. And I hope that answers the question that I quite often get asked where builders, you know how do I attract these? Or why do I keep getting people who waste my time and all that sort of stuff? 
 
And that is because the messaging, the positioning, the processes that you deliver, your building activities through, unfortunately attract the wrong type of people. 
 
And that’s why the marketing process needs to be the foundation on which you build your business. Don’t build your business first and then try and bolt a marketing strategy onto the side of it. 
 
So if you want help with anything at all that we have talked about in this show, I’d love to jump on a call. 
 
So here is how you do it. 
 
You can go to our website, buildersbusinessblackbelt.com.au as you can see, there’s a schedule, a call button there that’s if you’re just listening to the audio only version of the podcast. 
 
If you’re watching it on video, on our blog page, underneath the video here is a button you just hit that, it’ll take you to a short form that tells us a little bit about your organization so we can be best prepared for the call. And then it’ll take you to a calendar that you can book in the call.
 
 It’s a real short call, five, seven, 10 minutes, something like that, just so we can get a feel for where you are. If where I would have helped like we’re not suitable for everyone. 
 
So this first conversation is just figuring out if we can, if we can, we can talk about how that might work on a future call. But it’s absolutely worthwhile exploring if there are some things that we can help you with your business. That’s what we do. 
 
Your job is to run your business, operate your business, our job is to help you do that better and give you the outcomes, the life, the financial outcomes that you want for your business. 
 
That’s our job to help find things, put it in a format to help you and then deliver it to you so it can be implemented in your business. 
 
So I hope that makes sense. I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of Builder’s Business Success podcast, and we’ll be looking forward to talking to you again in the next episode. 
 
I’m Mick Hawes from Builder’s Business Black Belt, That is it, bye for now.

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